Food truck and caterer payroll: event crews, seasons, and clean ROEs

The casual-labour myth, retired

The exemption people half-remember — casual work escaping CPP and EI — applies only when the work is casual and outside the employer's usual trade or business. A student who paints your commissary fence once fits. The five servers you booked for a 200-guest wedding do not: catering events is precisely your business, so they are in pensionable, insurable employment from the first canape. Cash envelopes fail in every direction at once — no deductible wage expense you can support, exposure to gross-up assessments where CRA treats the cash as net pay, and a crew with no recourse when something goes wrong at a venue.

That leaves three legitimate ways to staff a Saturday, and the right one depends on the person, not your preference:

The contractor row is the one people stretch. A server who works your schedule, in your uniform, with your equipment is an employee no matter what the invoice says — and a CPP/EI ruling will say so retroactively, with both halves of the premiums landing on you.

A payroll shaped like the season

April is the sprint: TD1s collected digitally before anyone touches a chafing dish, direct deposit set up on day one, WSIB registration confirmed before the first festival, and everyone loaded into a cloud runner like Wagepoint so a crew of two can scale to twenty without new process. Peak season then throws its own rules at you. A festival week can push kitchen staff past 44 hours, where Ontario overtime starts — day rates do not switch that off, so track hours even for flat-rate crew. When a client cancels late and you send people home, the three-hour rule pays anyone who regularly works longer than three hours a three-hour minimum. And public-holiday pay follows the standard formula — four prior work weeks of wages divided by twenty — which handles wildly irregular event schedules on its own.

October: the ROE wave, done right

Seasonal layoffs make caterers heavy ROE issuers, and Service Canada reads these slips closely because your crew's winter EI claims depend on them. The trigger is an interruption of earnings — seven consecutive calendar days with no work and no insurable earnings. File electronically through ROE Web within five calendar days after the end of the pay period in which the interruption starts, use code A for shortage of work, and show an expected recall date when you genuinely plan to rehire in spring. The insurable-hours history in the ROE has to reconcile to your pay runs; this is where the discipline of putting every event crew through payroll pays off, because the hours are simply there.

Sloppy versions of this — paper ROEs weeks late, guessed hours, code errors — surface in January as calls from Service Canada and from former staff whose claims stalled. We batch the fall ROEs off the payroll data in one sitting.

Winter, the owner, and next spring

When the truck is parked, the corporation keeps living. Keep the payroll account open and report nil remittances for the quiet months so CRA does not chase a non-filer; decide deliberately whether the owner draws salary through winter for RRSP room and CPP continuity or shifts to dividends against the season's profit. Rehiring in March is a re-onboarding, not a formality — new TD1s if circumstances changed, updated rates, and recall letters that match what the ROEs promised. Commissary costs, event deposits, and HST on catering belong next door in our food truck and caterer bookkeeping, and if your circuit crosses into US festivals, the withholding questions live in our cross-border guide for food trucks and caterers.

Source: Service Canada — How to complete the Record of Employment.